Fair enough but I don't think you can deny that a meritocracy is only really possible in an ideal world. Merit is hard to quantify to begin with and without accounting for equal access to...
Fair enough but I don't think you can deny that a meritocracy is only really possible in an ideal world. Merit is hard to quantify to begin with and without accounting for equal access to opportunity and taking into consideration individual circumstances is biased in the extreme. Someone who comes from an economically disadvantaged childhood and/or an unstable background often has to work twice as hard as someone who grew up in a stable environment to achieve the same results. Studies on early childhood development and the long term effects of childhood environmental conditions are something that have been studied extensively and pretty much definitely prove this.
So while I don't think removing meritocracy as principle is ideal, I do see the point of removing it as well. I also think way too many people are jumping to way too many conclusions for such a simple, straightforward and reasonable action as removing it from the mission statement.
p.s. Whoever keeps using the noise tag just because they disagree with what is being said should seriously reconsider their actions. That is not what the noise tag is for. Noise is to denote "LOL" type pointless comments that only reduce the signal to noise ratio in a comment section.
I disagree. I agree that not everyone has the same oppertunity to achieve merit, but organisations which accept people on the basis of their merit can and do exist. Absolutely the case, and that's...
Meritocracy is only really possible in an ideal world
I disagree. I agree that not everyone has the same oppertunity to achieve merit, but organisations which accept people on the basis of their merit can and do exist.
Someone who comes from an economically disadvantaged childhood and/or an unstable background often has to work twice as hard as someone who grew up in a stable environment to achieve the same results.
Absolutely the case, and that's a great shame. It is the role of the state and the education system to try and level the playing field and help those from underprivilaged backgrounds to achieve their potential. However, it is not right for an organisation like Mozilla (or, for that matter, a University) to apply a 'privilage multiplier' to every applicant they recieve. That's what this is advocating for, in essence. Taking the sum total of what every person who walks through the door has achieved, and multiplying it by the reciprocal of their privilage.
Besides - we are lucky that our field of choice is one in which it is comparatively easy to achieve in spite of hardship. Most hackers are to an extent self-taught, and some of the best resources in the world are available freely and online. I doubt there's any mailing lists or IRC channels for aspiring marine biologists to talk and learn from the leading lights in their field. I don't wish to trivialise the barriers faced by those who are underprivilaged, but I don't feel that the mountain is an insurmountable one for the vast majority of people today.
Anyway, I think there's a lot of hypocrisy in the post-meritocracy attitude. A core tenent of it is the belief that technical skill should pale in importance to 'interpersonal skills'. Now, it's little secret that the tech world has long been a haven for individuals with poor interpersonal skills, and in particular those who would be considered autistic. Are we going to exclude people for being blunt and prickly, without regard to the value that they can offer to a community or project? That feels like discrimination to me. Not everyone is blessed with social grace - and while outright vitriol and personal attacks should not be tolerated, we can't just adopt a no-tolerance attitude to blunt individuals. What happens when the next Linus Torvalds or Theo de Raadt wanders into a mailing list or IRC channel for the first time and promptly gets permabanned for hurting someone's feelings? Would that really be making the world a better place?
I also think way too many people are jumping to way too many conclusions for such a simple, straightforward and reasonable action as removing it from the mission statement.
This isn't a debate in a vacuum chamber. This is a datapoint on a trendline that has become more and more obvious recently. The hacker culture that so many of us fell in love with - of judging people not for who they are, but for what they are able to achieve with a shell and a keyboard - is slowly fading into the mist.
Isn't it the other way around? In an anonymous environment I'm having a lack of data to "judge" (sorry, can't find a better English word, maybe 'rate'?) people I'm working with. But you can kinda...
Isn't it the other way around?
In an anonymous environment I'm having a lack of data to "judge" (sorry, can't find a better English word, maybe 'rate'?) people I'm working with. But you can kinda compare the outcome and their investment.
You repeated how upset you are, characterized the people you disagree with, a "certain group of people", as lazy good-for-nothings, and, with a straight face, claimed their goal is to make issues...
You repeated how upset you are, characterized the people you disagree with, a "certain group of people", as lazy good-for-nothings, and, with a straight face, claimed their goal is to make issues of skill and achievement something people don't consider important... Frankly, that's a pretty unsubstantial response.
In no way are they arguing that skill and achievement is useless. It's a rejection of the modern trend of using 'meritocracy' as an excuse to avoid fixing discriminatory practices. As the referenced study points out:
Our results show that women’s pull requests tend to be accepted more often than men’s, yet women’s acceptance rates are higher only when they are not identifiable as women. In the context of existing theories of gender in the workplace, plausible explanations include the presence of gender bias in open source, survivorship and self-selection bias, and women being held to higher performance standards.
Better work is rejected more often. More skilled people are rejected. That is the opposite of the ideal of 'meritocracy'.
Yet there are many that would confidently say that attempting to hire more women in computer science is anti-meritocratic, because to them the idea of 'meritocracy' is simply the idea of allowing biases to play out quietly. If people tend to hire white and Asian men more than any other group, they argue it must simply be that they have better merit! But we have substantial evidence that that isn't the case. That biases outweigh merit and people suffer for it.
Rejection of the word 'meritocracy' is rejecting the culture of ignoring biases that surround the word in order to achieve something far more purely 'meritocratic'.
Isn't this throwing the baby out with the bathwater? I don't see what's gained by saying "some people misuse the term meritocracy so we should reject it as a worthwhile goal" Every politically...
Isn't this throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
I don't see what's gained by saying "some people misuse the term meritocracy so we should reject it as a worthwhile goal"
Every politically charged term is misused and manipulated for malicious purposes. As a trivial example - how many people have a say in their governance in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea?
Let's leverage 'meritocracy' as a force for good - as a force against discriminatory practices and ingrained biases, rather than turning our backs on it.
We can either work to cement the concept of 'meritocracy' as being inherently anti-discrimination... or we can recognize its constant use as a way to justify discrimination and stop using it. It's...
We can either work to cement the concept of 'meritocracy' as being inherently anti-discrimination... or we can recognize its constant use as a way to justify discrimination and stop using it.
It's not like anyone is advocating we use a spoils system. Qualification and merit exist outside of this word.
This comes with it's own problems however. If you want to use your code contributions as part of a resume or portfolio when applying for a job - either you keep your contributions truly anonymized...
This comes with it's own problems however. If you want to use your code contributions as part of a resume or portfolio when applying for a job - either you keep your contributions truly anonymized and lose the ability to use your contributions to demonstrate talent, or you sacrifice anonymity in order to claim the contribution. Additionally, part of the reason meritocracy works at all is because it helps contributors feel appreciated... and if no one knows the contribution is yours, you feel removed from any appreciation your contribution earned.
As an ideal being able to fully hide the identity is great, but like any great theory the difficulty comes from the how you practically implement it.
An organization can still value technical skill and achievement even if it doesn't use the word "meritocracy" to describe itself. If you read the list of resources on the Post-Meritocracy...
An organization can still value technical skill and achievement even if it doesn't use the word "meritocracy" to describe itself. If you read the list of resources on the Post-Meritocracy Manifesto, you can see some of the problems that people have with the concept. For example, there's a tendency to justify toxic people being given power because of their past achievements or skill. At this point, the ideal of "meritocracy" can be used not just for including strong technical contributors, but also to exclude people that the existing contributors don't believe will be strong technically.
If a person who has gained power through technical skill is acting in a discriminatory manner, instead of hiring and promoting on the basis of merit, then they are displaying a lack of merit in...
If a person who has gained power through technical skill is acting in a discriminatory manner, instead of hiring and promoting on the basis of merit, then they are displaying a lack of merit in their leadership role, and should therefore be removed from said position of power - this is totally in accordance with meritocratic principles.
First I want to say thank you for expanding your point with that edit. I can't speak to what the comment was before I got here, but what looks like the added material does help my understanding of...
First I want to say thank you for expanding your point with that edit. I can't speak to what the comment was before I got here, but what looks like the added material does help my understanding of your point considerably.
I think it's interesting that the very first reason that this essay gives for walking away from the term "meritocracy" is that Mozilla itself isn't diverse. It is admitting out the gate that its representation isn't what most people would consider to be diverse, and that it shouldn't be hiding behind calling itself a meritocracy to cover for that fact. I think that's pretty startling as a starting point.
I also think that starting point does a lot to inform the main reasons they gave for why they are walking away from this term. Not because they want to make any particular policy change, but because they want to avoid using triggering words that serve as a flashpoint in ongoing cultural debates. I think that's pretty fair, to be honest.
Apologies - I see your point. I simply copied it verbatim from the HN post, under the assumption that their moderators would have changed it were it wrong.
Apologies - I see your point. I simply copied it verbatim from the HN post, under the assumption that their moderators would have changed it were it wrong.
I read it fully, twice through, infact. I assumed, however, that a verdict had been made elsewhere. I'm not familiar with the mozilla mailing list conventions, and inferred (perhaps incorrectly),...
I read it fully, twice through, infact. I assumed, however, that a verdict had been made elsewhere. I'm not familiar with the mozilla mailing list conventions, and inferred (perhaps incorrectly), that this is something akin to an RFC - whereby it is more of a mission statement and a roadmap than a public forum.
I've been thinking about this a lot since it was posted, and keep coming back to this point: Based on this statement, there are at least some people within Mozilla who believe that they fall short...
I've been thinking about this a lot since it was posted, and keep coming back to this point:
Considering diversity in gender representation, data shows open source lagging the rest of the industry. FLOSS 2013 [0] is obviously rather old now, but more recent data [1] (what is now the CHAOSS D&I working group of which Mozilla is a part [2]) appears to confirm this too. I share your instinct that open source should be more diverse, and yet, it does not seem to be.
Based on this statement, there are at least some people within Mozilla who believe that they fall short of being a true meritocracy-- they would expect its diversity to be similar to that of the industry in general if it were one. If you take this premise as true, labeling Mozilla as a true meritocracy works counter to diversity initiatives.
A simplified scenario with made up numbers: There is a team with 10 people, one of whom is a woman. When looking at similar organizations and graduation statistics, you'd expect there to be 3 or 4 women.
There could be many possible reasons for their absence. They may have not been at the right recruiting events or friendly get-togethers to learn about it. They may have joined but left after a missing stair harassed them. If it's a volunteer position they may not have as much time to devote to the project due to having more responsibilities elsewhere (such as childcare and household chores, which unfortunately still fall more to women on average). And some of them, yes, might not make the cut based on skills, just as some men didn't.
If the group prides itself on being a meritocracy and advertises itself as such, all the structural reasons are hidden behind the only individual one, skill. The women who never got to join or who left are automatically labeled as less competent, because if they were the best they'd have made it in and stuck it out. The default assumption becomes that women are simply not interested or skilled enough for the work, so why does the group need to diversify by increasing outreach, participating in diveristy training, or including childcare at conferences? That would be a waste, because it would only attract people who'd weaken the talent pool.
I think it's great to aspire to be an organization based on merit, and it doesn't look like the people at Mozilla who are proposing this want that to change. But I think that if you start from the position that Mozilla isn't there yet, this makes sense.
EDIT TL;DR: If you assume something is a meritocracy and it isn't, you won't do anything to fix it.
So... the skilled people will carry everyone else and get no benefits, recognition, pay increase, ect. Sounds like a way to do away with rewards. :v Yes, life is unfair but I doubt the end game...
So... the skilled people will carry everyone else and get no benefits, recognition, pay increase, ect. Sounds like a way to do away with rewards. :v
Yes, life is unfair but I doubt the end game here is actually social justice.
When one side is using blog posts for their citations and the other is using peer reviewed articles, but the blog post user is getting more support, you know you aren't actually in a meritocracy....
When one side is using blog posts for their citations and the other is using peer reviewed articles, but the blog post user is getting more support, you know you aren't actually in a meritocracy. Maybe Mozilla should term itself a diversocracy, where people are given positions based on what's in their pants and what their skin colour is? Certainly seems like the way they've been pushing it the last 5-10 years.
Fair enough but I don't think you can deny that a meritocracy is only really possible in an ideal world. Merit is hard to quantify to begin with and without accounting for equal access to opportunity and taking into consideration individual circumstances is biased in the extreme. Someone who comes from an economically disadvantaged childhood and/or an unstable background often has to work twice as hard as someone who grew up in a stable environment to achieve the same results. Studies on early childhood development and the long term effects of childhood environmental conditions are something that have been studied extensively and pretty much definitely prove this.
So while I don't think removing meritocracy as principle is ideal, I do see the point of removing it as well. I also think way too many people are jumping to way too many conclusions for such a simple, straightforward and reasonable action as removing it from the mission statement.
p.s. Whoever keeps using the noise tag just because they disagree with what is being said should seriously reconsider their actions. That is not what the noise tag is for. Noise is to denote "LOL" type pointless comments that only reduce the signal to noise ratio in a comment section.
I disagree. I agree that not everyone has the same oppertunity to achieve merit, but organisations which accept people on the basis of their merit can and do exist.
Absolutely the case, and that's a great shame. It is the role of the state and the education system to try and level the playing field and help those from underprivilaged backgrounds to achieve their potential. However, it is not right for an organisation like Mozilla (or, for that matter, a University) to apply a 'privilage multiplier' to every applicant they recieve. That's what this is advocating for, in essence. Taking the sum total of what every person who walks through the door has achieved, and multiplying it by the reciprocal of their privilage.
Besides - we are lucky that our field of choice is one in which it is comparatively easy to achieve in spite of hardship. Most hackers are to an extent self-taught, and some of the best resources in the world are available freely and online. I doubt there's any mailing lists or IRC channels for aspiring marine biologists to talk and learn from the leading lights in their field. I don't wish to trivialise the barriers faced by those who are underprivilaged, but I don't feel that the mountain is an insurmountable one for the vast majority of people today.
Anyway, I think there's a lot of hypocrisy in the post-meritocracy attitude. A core tenent of it is the belief that technical skill should pale in importance to 'interpersonal skills'. Now, it's little secret that the tech world has long been a haven for individuals with poor interpersonal skills, and in particular those who would be considered autistic. Are we going to exclude people for being blunt and prickly, without regard to the value that they can offer to a community or project? That feels like discrimination to me. Not everyone is blessed with social grace - and while outright vitriol and personal attacks should not be tolerated, we can't just adopt a no-tolerance attitude to blunt individuals. What happens when the next Linus Torvalds or Theo de Raadt wanders into a mailing list or IRC channel for the first time and promptly gets permabanned for hurting someone's feelings? Would that really be making the world a better place?
This isn't a debate in a vacuum chamber. This is a datapoint on a trendline that has become more and more obvious recently. The hacker culture that so many of us fell in love with - of judging people not for who they are, but for what they are able to achieve with a shell and a keyboard - is slowly fading into the mist.
Isn't it the other way around?
In an anonymous environment I'm having a lack of data to "judge" (sorry, can't find a better English word, maybe 'rate'?) people I'm working with. But you can kinda compare the outcome and their investment.
You repeated how upset you are, characterized the people you disagree with, a "certain group of people", as lazy good-for-nothings, and, with a straight face, claimed their goal is to make issues of skill and achievement something people don't consider important... Frankly, that's a pretty unsubstantial response.
In no way are they arguing that skill and achievement is useless. It's a rejection of the modern trend of using 'meritocracy' as an excuse to avoid fixing discriminatory practices. As the referenced study points out:
Better work is rejected more often. More skilled people are rejected. That is the opposite of the ideal of 'meritocracy'.
Yet there are many that would confidently say that attempting to hire more women in computer science is anti-meritocratic, because to them the idea of 'meritocracy' is simply the idea of allowing biases to play out quietly. If people tend to hire white and Asian men more than any other group, they argue it must simply be that they have better merit! But we have substantial evidence that that isn't the case. That biases outweigh merit and people suffer for it.
Rejection of the word 'meritocracy' is rejecting the culture of ignoring biases that surround the word in order to achieve something far more purely 'meritocratic'.
Isn't this throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
I don't see what's gained by saying "some people misuse the term meritocracy so we should reject it as a worthwhile goal"
Every politically charged term is misused and manipulated for malicious purposes. As a trivial example - how many people have a say in their governance in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea?
Let's leverage 'meritocracy' as a force for good - as a force against discriminatory practices and ingrained biases, rather than turning our backs on it.
We can either work to cement the concept of 'meritocracy' as being inherently anti-discrimination... or we can recognize its constant use as a way to justify discrimination and stop using it.
It's not like anyone is advocating we use a spoils system. Qualification and merit exist outside of this word.
Seems to me like the obvious solution is anonymized meritocracy. Hide the identity, don't amplify it.
This comes with it's own problems however. If you want to use your code contributions as part of a resume or portfolio when applying for a job - either you keep your contributions truly anonymized and lose the ability to use your contributions to demonstrate talent, or you sacrifice anonymity in order to claim the contribution. Additionally, part of the reason meritocracy works at all is because it helps contributors feel appreciated... and if no one knows the contribution is yours, you feel removed from any appreciation your contribution earned.
As an ideal being able to fully hide the identity is great, but like any great theory the difficulty comes from the how you practically implement it.
An organization can still value technical skill and achievement even if it doesn't use the word "meritocracy" to describe itself. If you read the list of resources on the Post-Meritocracy Manifesto, you can see some of the problems that people have with the concept. For example, there's a tendency to justify toxic people being given power because of their past achievements or skill. At this point, the ideal of "meritocracy" can be used not just for including strong technical contributors, but also to exclude people that the existing contributors don't believe will be strong technically.
If a person who has gained power through technical skill is acting in a discriminatory manner, instead of hiring and promoting on the basis of merit, then they are displaying a lack of merit in their leadership role, and should therefore be removed from said position of power - this is totally in accordance with meritocratic principles.
First I want to say thank you for expanding your point with that edit. I can't speak to what the comment was before I got here, but what looks like the added material does help my understanding of your point considerably.
I think it's interesting that the very first reason that this essay gives for walking away from the term "meritocracy" is that Mozilla itself isn't diverse. It is admitting out the gate that its representation isn't what most people would consider to be diverse, and that it shouldn't be hiding behind calling itself a meritocracy to cover for that fact. I think that's pretty startling as a starting point.
I also think that starting point does a lot to inform the main reasons they gave for why they are walking away from this term. Not because they want to make any particular policy change, but because they want to avoid using triggering words that serve as a flashpoint in ongoing cultural debates. I think that's pretty fair, to be honest.
The title seems to be inaccurate, unless I'm misunderstanding. It looks like this is a proposal, not something that will definitely happen.
Apologies - I see your point. I simply copied it verbatim from the HN post, under the assumption that their moderators would have changed it were it wrong.
But then does that mean that you didn't even read what you're linking to (and "sick to your stomach" about)?
I read it fully, twice through, infact. I assumed, however, that a verdict had been made elsewhere. I'm not familiar with the mozilla mailing list conventions, and inferred (perhaps incorrectly), that this is something akin to an RFC - whereby it is more of a mission statement and a roadmap than a public forum.
I've been thinking about this a lot since it was posted, and keep coming back to this point:
Based on this statement, there are at least some people within Mozilla who believe that they fall short of being a true meritocracy-- they would expect its diversity to be similar to that of the industry in general if it were one. If you take this premise as true, labeling Mozilla as a true meritocracy works counter to diversity initiatives.
A simplified scenario with made up numbers: There is a team with 10 people, one of whom is a woman. When looking at similar organizations and graduation statistics, you'd expect there to be 3 or 4 women.
There could be many possible reasons for their absence. They may have not been at the right recruiting events or friendly get-togethers to learn about it. They may have joined but left after a missing stair harassed them. If it's a volunteer position they may not have as much time to devote to the project due to having more responsibilities elsewhere (such as childcare and household chores, which unfortunately still fall more to women on average). And some of them, yes, might not make the cut based on skills, just as some men didn't.
If the group prides itself on being a meritocracy and advertises itself as such, all the structural reasons are hidden behind the only individual one, skill. The women who never got to join or who left are automatically labeled as less competent, because if they were the best they'd have made it in and stuck it out. The default assumption becomes that women are simply not interested or skilled enough for the work, so why does the group need to diversify by increasing outreach, participating in diveristy training, or including childcare at conferences? That would be a waste, because it would only attract people who'd weaken the talent pool.
I think it's great to aspire to be an organization based on merit, and it doesn't look like the people at Mozilla who are proposing this want that to change. But I think that if you start from the position that Mozilla isn't there yet, this makes sense.
EDIT TL;DR: If you assume something is a meritocracy and it isn't, you won't do anything to fix it.
I like this comment. It hasn't changed my stance but it is a nicely written piece that presents a position thoughtfully and intelligently.
So... the skilled people will carry everyone else and get no benefits, recognition, pay increase, ect. Sounds like a way to do away with rewards. :v
Yes, life is unfair but I doubt the end game here is actually social justice.
When one side is using blog posts for their citations and the other is using peer reviewed articles, but the blog post user is getting more support, you know you aren't actually in a meritocracy. Maybe Mozilla should term itself a diversocracy, where people are given positions based on what's in their pants and what their skin colour is? Certainly seems like the way they've been pushing it the last 5-10 years.